LISTEN: Prepare to Have Your Fragile World Shaken by Mitski’s Cover of One Direction’s “Fireproof”

The expanded re-release of “Bury Me at Make Out Creek” is out now via Don Giovanni Records.
LISTEN: Prepare to Have Your Fragile World Shaken by Mitski’s Cover of One Direction’s “Fireproof”

The expanded re-release of “Bury Me at Make Out Creek” is out now via Don Giovanni Records.

Words: Nate Rogers

photo by Daniel Dorsa

April 15, 2015

Mitski press photo by Daniel_Dorsa

Mitski Miyawaki doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures. If a song is good, it’s good, and that’s it. And as if to tackle that sentiment in the most extreme of circumstances, she’s gone and covered One Direction.

“Fireproof” originally featured a million-dollar sheen and, like, fifty different choirboy vocal lines, but both of those attributes have been torn away in Mitski’s very earnest, very raw version of the tune, which, if you heard it playing without context, you’d never know that it was basically written in a lab by music execs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnUWcm6KK6c

Speaking of her motivation for the Billboard-premiered track, Mitski explained in a statement:

We seem to delegitimize music that has a majority of young girl fans and think of it as having less cultural value. Isn’t that strange? I’m not down with the elitism of indie rock music, where it considers itself to be more “serious” or “intelligent” than mainstream pop. That thought often has nothing to do with the composition or political motivations of the music as it’s conveyed to be about, and more to do with its production, “aesthetic,” and just another kind of branding. Here is a mainstream pop song that I liked and recorded with an “indie rock aesthetic.” Is it more thoughtful now?

Touché, Mitski. Touché.

The expanded re-release of Bury Me at Make Out Creek is out now on Don Giovanni Records.